Service providers and device manufacturers (e.g., wireless, cellular, etc.) are continually challenged to deliver value and convenience to consumers by, for example, providing compelling network services. Often the services include delivering content, such as music data, to a consumer's equipment for rendering on that equipment. A consumer often chooses to store the delivered content as files on one or more computer-readable storage medium, including in some instances one or more removable computer-readable storage medium (such as a mobile memory card, MMC). With multiple such content files on the storage device, a consumer uses an index to quickly identify particular content for rendering based on metadata about the content, such as song title or artist name.
However, when a removable storage medium is moved to different equipment, such as equipment of a friend of the consumer, or new equipment of the consumer, the index generally is not useable. The index points to files with absolute directory paths on the prior equipment that may not be valid on the different equipment. Consequently, the different equipment has to execute a process to generate the index anew from the content files found on the removable storage medium. Generating an index from stored content can expend considerable computational, memory, bandwidth, and battery resources on the different equipment and delay the availability of the content. Often, the delay is a noticeably long time, such as a delay in a range from tens of minutes to over an hour, depending on the size of the files, the equipment properties, and the number of applications executing simultaneously on the equipment.